Master of the Universe

Forty years ago, Neal Adams belonged to a poor man's gym: a Coney Island moving company. This was years before he reinvented Batman and X-Men, almost single-handedly reviving the wheezing comic book industry. He had talent and drive, but the comics business was tough to crack into, so he did whatever it took to make ends meet. These days, the 59-year-old artist pays to do his lifting twice a week at the Chelsea Piers Sports Center, a beautiful-people jockopolis on Manhattan's West Side. Today, with Ethan Hawke shooting baskets a few yards away, Adams is working his chest.

Except that he's doing more talking than lifting. At the bench press, with 360 pounds resting 2 feet over his head, he's holding forth about a radical scientific theory he dreamed up, one he believes is supported by an undersea map published in 1996 by the National Geophysical Data Center, a division of the US Department of Commerce. The map illustrates that nowhere on Earth is the seafloor older than 180 million years. This has Adams very excited. If Earth is more than 4 billion years old, as most experts believe, how could the ocean floor be so young?

The answer, Adams says, is simple - and it forms the core assertion in his new, 28-years-in-the-making book, A Conversation Between Two Guys in a Bar OR A New Model of the Universe. The map is proof - proof! - that Earth is growing, steadily increasing in mass and volume. The planet isn't just getting older; it's getting bigger.

It should be noted up front that Adams isn't a scientist. He's a self-taught science buff, a man operating in the grand outside-the-academy tradition that has produced both greatness (Thomas Edison, Steve Wozniak) and not-so-greatness (Erich von Daniken). Adams has been fascinated by science for as long as he can remember, and he travels between disciplines like a car zigzagging on the freeway. For him, the notion of a growing Earth is just a starting point on the way to debunking not only a core principle of geology - plate tectonics - but the very underpinnings of geophysics, cosmology, particle physics, even Einstein's assertions about the speed of light. If the Earth is growing, he insists, this means the total amount of matter and energy in the universe is increasing - which means matter is infinite, not finite like big bang theorists believe. Adams doesn't even believe there was a big bang. It was more like a whimper, a birthing cry to herald what's really been going on ever since: Matter is being created all the time, in astounding quantities. The Earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the entire universe - it's all growing. Not just expanding relative to one another through space. Growing.

It's all explained in the book and accompanying video, which Adams plans to sell for $60 to $80 at www.nealadamsentertainment.com and in comic book stores around the country. The initial print run is 10,000, but if he can generate enough buzz he'll print a lot more and try to airdrop his theories into scientific institutions, school libraries, and bookstore chains. Because information this hot, Adams believes, should not be kept from the masses.

If the book's title seems unlikely to appeal to academics, so does the format. It's a 125-page graphic novel, complete with frames, speech bubbles, and any number of self-conscious puns. Nor is it a natural for the legions of fans who remember Adams mainly for his pulp comics. The illustrations are amazing, and the implications fantastic, but the actual story line is pretty dry and repetitive. Two table-pounding scientists - a radical theoretician and a straw man - work their way through a loooong conversation en route to a telegraphed conclusion: Everything we know is wrong. It's like My Dinner With Andre costarring L. Ron Hubbard.

For Adams, the book is a personal mission. If he succeeds, his elaborate theories will get a hearing in the scientific community, and he'll go down as a modern Galileo. "There's all kinds of things that can come from this," he says. "I want to see it get past the point where it's ridiculed, to a point where people are considering it so we can see what happens. I want to see antigravity. I want to see intergalactic communication. If I'm right, those things will happen."

Of course, he's probably not right, and Einstein is likely to remain standing on his pedestal, frizzy and unbowed. But that doesn't mean Two Guys isn't worth a look. Though it may never win Adams a Nobel Prize, the book is audacious, crotchety, and eye-popping. What more could you ask from an aging comics genius?

At the bench press, Adams finally stops talking and gets ready to lift. As I stand above him, looking doubtful, he hoists the bar off its notches. Quickly, he brings it down near his chest and thrusts it up again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Two reps shy of a set, he sits up, beaming. Not bad, his face seems to say, for an old fart.

The decor in the 45th Street offices of Adams' Continuity Studios is right out of 1975, complete with a mix of paneling, red carpeting, and once-mod mirrors that now seem dreary. Many of the employees are family members, which makes the place homey, though it's also a bit stifling. Especially considering that Adams' current wife, Marilyn, runs the place and his ex-wife, Cory, answers the phones. But this family-saturation approach makes Adams comfortable, and at Continuity that's job one.

Although Adams hasn't published any comics for years, the fame he earned in the late '60s and early '70s is still paying dividends. He draws occasional prints for Warner Bros. stores, and he has designed a few theme park rides, including Universal Studios' T2. Ten years ago, Continuity opened a beachhead office in Burbank, California, to do illustration work for Hollywood, and Adams has plans to break into movies once Two Guys is behind him. Until then there are bills to pay, mostly by way of low-res animation for ad agencies. But that's only when he's not promoting or explaining the book, which he does with unique gusto.

In a typical sprint - a nine-hour lecture he delivered to me one sunny day in November - Adams' stream of often-profane verbiage is interrupted only by swills of Diet Coke and a few bathroom breaks. Sometimes he grows angry at one foe or another ("People are assholes, that pretty much explains everything") or becomes incredulous at the very notion that science is complicated: "I could teach you all you'll ever need to know about physics in a term!" He doesn't stop to eat. He doesn't even wait for questions - he asks and answers everything himself.

His interest in geology dates back to the early '70s, a few years after researchers accepted the notion that the continents rest on tectonic plates that drift slowly around the globe. Adams was struck by the Pangaea theory, which holds that all of Earth's landmass once existed as part of a single supercontinent, until roughly 200 million years ago. He didn't buy it. "Put yourself in my place," he says. "You listen to this and as an artist you try to visualize it. And it occurs to you that this is totally wrong."

First problem: The whole arrangement - with the übercontinent Pangaea on one side of the globe and empty ocean on the other - looked lopsided. "The Earth is spinning," he reminds me. "When you spin something, everything on it evens out." Second: It's obvious that the landmasses bordering the Atlantic fit together - South America into Africa, North America into Europe, et cetera. But it was obvious (to him, at least) that the lands bordering the Pacific would also match up if you pushed them together. The Pangaea theory couldn't account for this fact, and no one dared acknowledge it, Adams reasoned, because it would be impossible for the continents to be joined along both the Atlantic and Pacific seams at once. Unless ...

He began tracing the continents and pasting them on basketballs to see if they might all fit together into a single sphere, and ... it worked! Yes, he decided, Pangaea once existed, but it wasn't a big lump surrounded by water. Instead, it was a shell that covered the entire planet. From this insight sprang Adams' revolutionary theory: The planet was once a third the size it is today, and it's been growing ever since. He believes that in another 200 million years, Earth will be the size of Neptune.

The big bang was just a birthing cry. Matter is being created all the time, in astounding quantities.

To get a fair hearing for this somewhat twisted geological theory, Adams knew he'd have to explain where all this new matter - the extra stuff necessary to fuel Earth's growth - was coming from. He started reading physics textbooks to learn about the atomic structure of matter. Along the way he decided that the universe contains a fundamental building block that scientists haven't yet discovered, an electromagnetically balanced neutral particle that he calls "prime matter," which makes up 90 percent or more of our cosmos. This undetected particle, Adams contends, affects everything that passes through it. For example, it controls the speed at which light travels - which means, among other things, that the speed of light is not a constant, as presupposed by Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2.

As Adams describes it, prime matter sounds a bit like the ether, a pervasive physical essence that 19th-century physicists believed was the propagating medium for light. But it may have more in common with so-called dark matter, a mysterious particle, first theorized more than 50 years ago by Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky. Scientists have observed dark matter through its effects on celestial bodies, and recently they've begun attempts to isolate and deconstruct an actual particle. This effort promises to be one of the great scientific stories of our time.

Adams already knows what those scientists will find when they isolate dark matter: potential. Dark matter, prime matter - call it what you will, Adams says it's nothing more than "matter in waiting." Given billions of years and the right conditions - like those at the center of the Earth and on the sun - it will evolve into the various elements of the periodic table.

Adams insists that this supposedly impossible phenomenon - the creation of something out of nothing - has been recorded many times. He cites the experiments of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carl David Anderson, who in 1932 discovered the positron - a positively charged version of an electron that appeared seemingly out of nowhere while he was trying to photograph a cosmic ray in a cloud chamber. Today, the positron is considered a form of antimatter, because at the nanomoment it appears, it searches out an electron and the two essentially cancel each other out, leaving behind a trace of gamma radiation and, Adams believes, an infinitesimal amount of extra energy as the only evidence of their existence. "They call it antimatter," Adams says, "because they say it destroys matter. But that's not what it is."

Almost five hours into Adams' dissertation, my mind begins to wander. He notices me looking bleary-eyed. "Stay with me," he commands, "because I'm about 10 minutes away from really fucking up your brain."

He launches into a round of rhetorical questions: What if the positron isn't antimatter at all? What if it destroys itself in scientific experiments only because it's close to an electron? What if the positron couldn't find an electron? What would it do? Adams holds that a positron attracts - if there are no electrons nearby, it will seek out something else. But what?

His answer is that the positron will attract particles of electromagnetically neutral prime matter. Once these particles join with the positron, they become "neutron material." Maintaining the positron's positive charge, the prime matter will build in layers around it until the whole arrangement is 1,998 times larger than the positron - exactly the size of a proton, which is what the thing has become.

Now, when the proton encounters an electron, the positron at the proton's core is so insulated that the two won't snuff each other out. Instead, the electron will orbit the larger proton. And voilà! You have matter.

In his book, Adams goes into exhaustive detail about how these first particles of matter assemble into hydrogen molecules, then add protons and electrons to form helium and, ultimately, every other element in the periodic table. But he realizes that many people will get bogged down in all the pages of physics. So he's producing a fun Two Guys companion video - an animated Nova -style docudrama that depicts the growth of the Earth over the past 400 million years. He's also rendered the growth of the moon. Why the moon? Because there you can see the stretch marks - the geological features called mares - left by its growth over time. Adams is certain that this visual aid will blow people away. "Everyone I've ever showed this to has said, 'How could it be any other way?'"

As a child, Adams was drawn to both art and science. He dreamed of a scientific education, but there was no money for college - his dad skipped out when he was 13 - so in the early '50s he enrolled at a vocational high school for aspiring artists, the School of Industrial Arts (now the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, intending to study comic book illustration.

This was a turbulent era in comicdom. Thanks in part to a sensationalist book called Seduction of the Innocent, which linked juvenile delinquency to comic books, the industry had instituted the Comics Code, a now infamous form of self-censorship. "It was a strange time," Adams says. "People were looking for spooks under every bed. And there were some pretty disgusting comic books back then. So by 1954, that was it."

At DC and Marvel, Adams was a great craftsman, a crusader, and a colossal ego - fearless, hard-nosed, but no hero.

The school had stopped teaching comic book art, but Adams and a few classmates convinced one teacher to offer a course. When Adams graduated, he thought his portfolio would get him a job. It didn't. An assistant at DC Comics told him his stuff was good, but he was wasting his time: The industry was dying. He got a little work at Archie Comics, and then bounced around, doing some advertising stuff and a comic strip called Ben Casey.

With a more developed portfolio, Adams tried DC again in 1959, and got a warmer reception; he began working on War Stories and Deadman. Then he told the editor, Julius Schwartz, that he'd like to take a shot at improving Batman, which, in the mid- to late '60s, was like the TV show - it featured what Adams calls "men running around in gray underwear."

Schwartz said no, but Adams had better luck with the editor of The Brave and the Bold, which in each issue paired Batman with a different DC character - Aquaman, the Flash, and so on. He quickly shook things up. "When the scripts came in with Batman entering a room, I wouldn't have him walk through the door," Adams says. "I'd have him come through the window or step out of the shadows. I found ways of altering him without offending the writer - making him more mysterious, dark, dangerous."

Readers responded with a slew of letters arguing that The Brave and the Bold's Batman was the real Batman. This convinced Schwartz to put Adams on Batman in 1969, teaming him with writer Denny O'Neil. Although Adams' work on the Caped Crusader shaped our modern image of the characters - inspiring Frank Miller's Dark Knight series in the '80s and Tim Burton's Batman movies - his tenure was brief. After two years, he took on another assignment: Green Lantern. Working with O'Neil again, Adams partnered Green Lantern with Green Arrow and sent the superheroes out to tangle with issues like overpopulation, the court system, even Richard Nixon's White House. It was the first in a wave of socially relevant comic books, and the beginning of the end of the Comics Code.

One in the series - Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85 - is among the most famous comic books of all time. Its cover featured Speedy, Green Arrow's ward, shooting up heroin. At first DC refused to publish it. But Adams says that DC decided to go ahead with #85 after its main rival, Marvel Comics, ignored the code and published an issue of Spider-Man in which a character "popped a few pills and walked off a roof." Soon thereafter, the Comics Code was relaxed; today it's all but ignored.

Even while he was working for DC, Adams was intrigued by the work coming out of arch-rival Marvel Comics. He approached Stan Lee about taking over X-Men in 1969. By then, most of the characters, including Professor Charles Xavier, had been killed off, and the series was about to be canceled. But over the course of nine issues, starting with Uncanny X-Men #56 in May 1969, Adams and chief writer Roy Thomas reconstructed what would become the best-selling comic book series of all time, playing out an elaborate scheme to bring the dead characters back to life. The most important task was to revive Professor X: Adams and Thomas decided that he had faked his death so he could retreat into a period of mental training that would allow him to link minds with all the Earth's benevolent forces and thwart a coming mutant invasion. "By the time I was through, whatever they had done to take it apart, I put back," Adams says. "After that, every new artist who came to Marvel wanted to do X-Men."

None of this made Adams a hero at Marvel or DC, however. He was notorious for missed deadlines and a tremendous ego. And he was a troublemaker, battling over compensation and benefits. In 1970, Lee started the Academy of Comic Book Artists, to help promote comic books as an art form. Lee declined to be interviewed for this article, but in 1998 he told Comic Book Artist that Adams "wanted to turn the whole damn thing into a union. ... I walked away. Neal was elected president, but ... the whole thing collapsed."

But not before Adams got his way. Today, artists generally retain ownership of original art, and many comics cognoscenti look up to Adams as both a craftsman and a crusader. "Neal Adams is regarded as one of the top five comic book artists of all time," says Jon Cooke, editor of Comic Book Artist. "He introduced a realistic dynamic to comic book art. But he also demanded change. There's almost a serf mentality in comics, toeing the company line. Neal is fearless. He's hard-nosed on his principles. Some people wish he'd just shut up and draw."

Adams is trying to shake up the scientific world, but he's hardly the first layman to arrive on the scene with earth-shattering theories. Publishers, universities, and academic scientists receive countless manuscripts written by lone-wolf visionaries who howl that the establishment is deluded about evolution or cold fusion or the nature of gravitation. Looking for guidance, I set up a meeting with Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in El Cerrito, California, and a fellow with the Committee for the Scientific Investigations of Claims of the Paranormal. She evaluates fantastic claims all the time, and I want to ask her where Adams fits on the continuum.

For Scott, the primary indicator of weird science is a reference to conspiracy. "Real scientists don't convince you by telling you that others are lying," she says. By that measure, Adams is definitely out there. He claims the scientific community speaks a language of exclusion in order to lock out the layperson - and that it discourages alternative thought with ridicule. He doesn't consider these actions intentionally malicious; he realizes that it's easier to go along with the status quo. "People tend not to want to question dogma," he says. "But I'm afraid of dogma."

If I really want to deconstruct Two Guys, Scott tells me, I should read "A Consumer's Guide to Pseudoscience," a classic essay by James Trefil, a physics professor at George Mason University. One of Trefil's key indicators of fringedom is a simple question: Are established scientists putting in time on the alleged phenomenon?

That's difficult to judge with Adams, because his theories are so vast. So I narrow my search to scientists who share his fundamental idea that the Earth is growing. As it turns out, unbeknownst to Adams, there is a faction of active growing-Earth theoreticians, many of whom live in or near Australia. The Australia cluster may owe a lot to the influence of S. Warren Carey, the godfather of the theory and founder of the geology department at the University of Tasmania.

As a scientist, researchers say, Adams draws really great comics. His secret weapon: massive amounts of enthusiasm and verbiage.

I talk to James Maxlow, one of Carey's disciples and a PhD candidate at Western Australia's Curtin University. Maxlow is finishing up a dissertation called "Global Expansion Tectonics," and when I tell him about Two Guys, he gets very excited by the prospect that the book might draw attention to the cause. Maxlow says he's not qualified to comment on Adams' physics, but he thinks Adams has a lot of the geology right. He's even thinking about jettisoning the word "expansion" in favor of "growth" - because growth has a better ring to it.

All of which is good for the Adams cause. Unfortunately, though, Maxlow sometimes reaches into the conspiracy grab-bag himself when he's making a case. "A lot of funding for research is going into plate tectonics," he says, "so scientists are reluctant to have me stir the pot."

As it turns out, that's about it for supportive colleagues. By and large, the university researchers I speak to say that as a scientist, Adams draws really great comics. At UC Berkeley I visit a geophysics professor named Mark Bukowinski whose reaction to Two Guys leaves little room for interpretation: "We do all kinds of measurements," he says. "The Earth is not growing."

Stephen Hsu, a physics professor at the University of Oregon (and a childhood fan of Adams' comics), says Adams' physics is entirely wacky, that he just picked a conclusion and backfilled the proof - much like he brought Professor X back to life. "I admire Adams' enthusiasm," Hsu says, "but there's a reason why physics is a professional subject."

To give Adams an opportunity for rebuttal, I propose a conference call with Hsu. After the introductions, Adams launches his secret weapon: a massive amount of verbiage. He recounts the history and breakdown of his book, with nary a beat for Hsu to step in, and says dark matter's discovery bolsters his assumptions. Hsu admits that he has doubts about whether geologists are right about everything. "To us hardcore scientists," he begins, "it seems like they just make up stories."

That sends Adams into a 15-minute tirade against plate tectonics that ends with: "Anyone who raises their head above the morass will have to say that the Earth grew."

But it goes downhill from there. Hsu cites ongoing experiments that measure movement in the Earth by tracking the distance between light beams at three different stations, at a rate of accuracy measured in angstroms. "If the Earth was expanding, that would show up," he says. Also, if the Earth and moon were growing in circumference, they'd be growing closer together. They're not.

Adams and Hsu go back and forth for two hours. It's a polite exchange that roams from Einstein's theories to the structure of a proton to the fact that when an electron and a positron emerge from a cosmic ray, all the energy they produce is accounted for in the byproduct: gamma radiation. This final assertion floors Adams, who believes that there's an extra bit of energy that incites the prime-matter-to-matter evolution process.

"I never heard that before," he says. "I don't have an explanation for that."

After hanging up, Adams claims he held his own. But when I arrive at Continuity the next morning, Marilyn tells me he was up until the wee hours, searching the Web for evidence that all the energy is indeed accounted for when a positron and electron split out of a cosmic ray.

Adams is eager to discuss the conversation. At my request, he starts sketching a picture of Batman, while bouncing back and forth between explanations of the difference between the way Asians and Westerners use their drawing instruments and the molecular makeup of iron.

I ask him why he's so concerned about whether all the energy can be accounted for in the gamma radiation, and he tells me that the extra bit of energy is necessary to incite the transformation from prime matter to matter. Without it, he says, the process doesn't seem possible.

It's strange that he's been deflated by this bit of scientific "dogma" even as he strives to disprove the accepted theory of the history of our universe.

As he puts the final swoosh at the bottom of Batman's cape, Adams sticks out his chest and says, in the sort of baritone that you might expect from Batman, "I wantyou for the Batman army."

"Hey, Neal," I say, as he turns the chair toward me and holds up the drawing, "what if you didn't need that energy?"

"What do you mean?" he asks.

"What if it's not energy as we understand it that makes it happen?" I say. "Maybe there's something called prime energy that starts the whole process."

He lifts his eyebrows a bit and smiles. "Maybe," he says softly, just before he spins his chair back toward his desk.